Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  Gertrude Bell wrote from Baghdad in June, 1920: ‘The Nationalist propaganda increases. There are constant meetings in mosques. The extremists are out for independence without Mandate…. They have created a reign of terror; if anyone says boo in the bazaar it shuts like an oyster. There has been practically no business done for the last fortnight.’

  These were symptoms of approaching tragedy. Miss Bell wrote these words on the eve of a tribal uprising against the British that lasted from July to October 1920 and which cost the British (and Indians) – operating in shade temperatures of 110° and over – 2269 men killed, wounded and missing, and the Arabs something like 8000. The principal rising took place in the middle Euphrates area. The town of Samawa was cut off by the Beni Hacheim, Diwaniya was evacuated. The railway tracks were cut and station-masters shot. Attempting to drop stores to the Samawa garrison, a British plane was shot down and the pilot and observer killed. The gun-boat Greenfly, on the same mission, grounded and its British and Indian crew was captured. Several British Political Officers up and down the country were killed including Gerald Leachman, and others were hastily withdrawn from their posts (Suq-esh-Shiukh was one) to save them from the same fate.

  Further north, the British suffered a murderous jolt. A column consisting of the 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, two squadrons of Scinde Horse, a battery of field artillery and a company of Sikh Pioneers was cut to pieces by tribesmen. The Manchester Column, as it came to be known, suffered nearly 200 men killed and 60 wounded, and lost 160 men as prisoners. This was the high spot of the insurrection from the Arab point of view.

  In the middle Euphrates, Government had been entirely withdrawn, and the Arab tribes were delirious with success. Religious leaders in Kerbela and Nejef were preaching jehad against the British. The tribes of the north had responded; several isolated British officials had been killed there. The imminent risk, as the British commander-in-chief, General Sir Aylmer Haldane, knew very well, was that the Muntafiq and Tigris tribal confederations would join in the fighting. The Muntafiq, Thomas estimated, could have contributed 20,000 riflemen against the British. Thomas himself, though it looked very possible that the Gharraf tribes would rise around him, stuck it out at his post at Shatra week after week – until ‘200 youths were to assemble daily in front of my house to demonstrate, the tribes were carrying arms again to a man, Shia clergy were preaching jehad, and rifle-firing through the night became a normal practice’. At this point, when he had ceased to have any authority whatsoever, Thomas withdrew – helped to do so safely, it is important to add, by one of the powerful sheikhs who had given the British so much trouble during the war with the Turks, Sheikh Khayun al Ubaid.

  In the event, by October the insurrection was over. British reinforcements were rushed in from India, raising the total of British (and Indian) forces from about 60,000 in July to about 101,000 in October. Apart from that, the Muntafiq tribes did not seriously join the revolt, although some Marsh tribes let off a volley from time to time at Euphrates river traffic. All the Tigris tribes remained passive. Even on the Gharraf, the jehad call did not really catch on. But for the British it had been a horribly close shave.

  The reasons for the 1920 revolt against the British, and for its failure, are complex. The agitation by urban nationalists for a completely independent Iraq without the British was one factor. Added to that, a number of sheikhs genuinely believed that the British General Maude had promised on entering Baghdad that Mesopotamia would be for the Arabs. Now, they thought they saw the British digging in for a prolonged occupation. A religious factor was the hostility to the ‘infidel’ British presence of the Muslim divines in the holy cities, Nejef and Kerbela. Still a fourth element in the tragedy was the irritation of certain tribes at the new administrative discipline imposed by the British, and new taxes.

  The Tigris tribes remained quiet partly because the grand sheikhs were satisfied with their land settlement; partly because they were geographically farthest from the influence of the religious leaders preaching jehad; and partly, so at least senior British officials in Baghdad thought, because of the sympathy and consideration the Amara Political officer, Captain Hedgcock, had shown for the Arabs with whom he had to deal. The Muntafiq did not rise, perhaps, because of the immense prestige of men like Khayun al Ubaid, who replied to the emissaries of the religious leaders in Nejef and to the chiefs of militant tribes that the Muntafiq had been too much weakened by internal conflict and the events of the war against the Turks to risk further disasters. This point was used by other former enemies of the British who now stood by them – men like Sheikh Ali al Fadhil and Badr al Rumaiyidh of the Albu Salih.

  In the end, Thomas handed over to Sheikh Khayun before he evacuated his isolated post during the rising. Within six months he was back and remained as Political Officer for six months more, dividing his time between hunting with a pack of long-dogs and indulging an amateur’s enthusiasm for archaeology. When he left Shatra, the sheikhs gave him a farewell party and handed him a souvenir. It was a sword, and they presented it saying, ‘This is the sword that led us at the battle of Butaniya’.

  The fighting shed light on Arab military and physical prowess. During the insurrection, British military headquarters in Baghdad issued some notes on Modern Arab Warfare for the use of their troops. ‘The Arab insurgents (it said) may be met with in any number up to 10,000. One in four is usually mounted, and one in three armed with a modern rifle. The remainder represent the supply and medical services of a regular army, removing the dead and wounded…. They flock to the banner of their sheikh and then to the sound of the guns, moving and collecting with a rapidity little short of marvellous. Their ammunition is limited. They are consequently very careful in its use. They must be considered good shots…. However, owing to their lack of organization … they can rarely alter plans once made.’

  As to the Arabs’ speed of movement, an Indian cavalry officer noted in the operations round Qurna in 1915 that, when mounted, the Arab tribesmen could always outpace the British cavalry. He himself was mounted on no mean polo pony – it had been a reserve mount for the International Polo match with the United States. He found that on their own terrain the Arabs on foot could go faster than he could. As to the Arabs’ shooting, my own observation tells me that it is not always the most accurate in the world. Yet, their bullets forced British pilots to keep 2000 feet up. And it is true that in 1926 a Muntafiq tribesman took a shot at Sir Alan Cobham’s plane as he flew over on his record-breaking flight to Australia and killed the wretched mechanic at his side.

  The year 1920 was a fearful one. The insurrection had cost the British Government twenty million pounds. Some British officials, Brigadier Stephen Longrigg told me recently, felt that after the revolt and bloodshed ‘things never felt quite the same again’. Though law and order had returned, the bitterness of frustrated aspirations had not been exorcised. Instead of independence and a republic the Iraqis were presented with a Hashemite king, Faisal (Miss Bell’s favourite), and an administration heavily reliant on British advisers. Faisal was the most famous leader in the Arab Revolt, of which T. E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. As the son of the Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz, he was of noble desert origins, was a sympathetic, sensitive and honourable man, but he was installed in Baghdad by the British and this foreign sponsorship was never forgotten or forgiven. At Faisal’s British-style coronation in 1921, Iraq became, an English writer has said, ‘an Anglo-Arab kingdom,’ half-way between a colony and a nation. Although gradually Iraq was to become an independent state and member of the League of Nations, and although the mandate was eventually ended, the taint of the British connection that fell on Faisal and on the son and grandson who succeeded him, as well as on many other prominent Iraqi graduates of the Arab Revolt, was never washed away. In 1958 it was to be a major cause of the violent overthrow of the monarchy.

  For the moment, in 1920, however, peace and friendship returned to the Marshes; and perhaps thanks to the insurre
ction there was a great mutual respect between the local British Political Officers and the tribesmen. Bertram Thomas, happy to be back in the wide, green spaces of Shatra after the collective nightmare, jotted down in his notebook the following indisputable thought: ‘The tribesman, with his rifle at his side and living in remote places, is governable only so long as he is convinced of his ruler’s power and will to govern, as well as of that ruler’s genuine desire for his welfare.’

  6 Dreams of a Shipping Clerk

  In 1951 Basra showed no trace of having been the supply-hub of great military operations in two world wars. In the Second World War its wharves and airstrips had supported the British campaign against Reza Shah of Persia and against an Iraqi nationalist rising in Baghdad. The British regiments and Gurkha battalions had long departed; but the port still flourished.

  From the BOAC Argonaut that circled the port before landing, I saw the queue of big merchant ships waiting at anchor in the centre of the Shatt al Arab as they do today; bows pointing up-stream, equi-distant from each other like men-of-war in battle-line about to fire broadsides into the little city. Basra was then Iraq’s only port, and the ships rode there taking on wheat and barley brought down from the Gharraf and Amara. The grain was loaded by sweating coolies into slings from iron barges that snuggled alongside them like piglets against a sow: 10,000 to 15,000 tonners of the Lascar-crewed British India Line, for the Bremen-based Hansa Line with big red Maltese Crosses painted on their black funnels, of the Maersk and Strick lines and a dozen other companies. I used to fancy that the clang and rasp of their winch-cables, the thudding of their donkey-engines and the metallic booming of colliding barges must be audible to Marsh Arabs in their silent reed-beds further north.

  My job was to see that the cargoes of Ralli Brothers, the company I worked for, were correctly loaded, and so my days were divided between Ralli Brothers’ dank, crumbling office in the old bazaar and the ships. Their steel decks were often wind-swept and slippery with rain in wintertime and always as hot as oven-tops in Basra’s cruel summers, but it was good to be on the river whatever the weather. I was rowed out to the ships by the same old man and his son in their long, crude gondola-like boat (called a bellam in Iraq). ‘Good morning,’ the old man said as he fixed the heavy oars in their rowlocks. ‘Al Alamani (the German ship) today? Al Hollandi?’

  The waters of the Shatt al Arab, the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris, were deep here, the colour of strong coffee with milk in it, and the current strong. It flowed fast and powerfully in the straight, wide channel to the sea, but you got no feel of nearness to any sea; no salty tang penetrated up here. The port was well inland and this enhanced its beauty. For the green banks of the waterway were lined, mile after mile, with the date-palms for which southern Iraq is famous, shaking their fronds in every breeze like mops of uncombed hair: dense groves inhabited sparsely by the Arab employees of the date-exporting firms, and enlivened by kingfishers, bee-eaters, warblers and black and white crows. The Old City of Basra, full of cadaverous Arab houses with embossed wooden doors and heavy casements that tilted perilously over passers-by in the street, stood back from the Shatt al Arab. It was connected to it by a long creek which ran past the Governor’s offices and then through a sprawling residential and market quarter called Ashar. On the south side of the Ashar creek a long, straight corniche borders the Shatt al Arab. There, several British employees of shipping companies and date-packing firms lived in old, ponderous Turkish mansions. From their first-floor verandas they could look down over their evening drinks and watch the big steel ships noisily winching up their cargoes, the bellam-men straining their oars against the current, and the motor-boats restlessly chugging back and forth. Sometimes these launches carried wedding parties, loud with thudding drums and tambourines and singing. In the hot weather the crewmen of the dhows that come up from the Gulf, of even from Zanzibar, came ashore and sprawled under the trees on the water’s edge in midsummer indolence. Close to Old Basra on the edge of the desert that stretches uninterrupted to the Red Sea was the little town of Zubair, near where the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law, Ali, fought the fratricidal Battle of the Camel. A little further north was the airstrip at Shuaiba where the British and Indian Armies scattered the Turks and their Arab tribal irregulars in 1915. And then the water and the reed-beds of the Madan began and straddled the way north.

  The commercial buildings of Ashar had high ceilings and old, baroquely embellished fans that either hardly turned fast enough to stir the heavy humid air or, if turned up too far, went berserk and started whizzing round like aeroplane propellers, scattering papers in all directions and threatening to tear loose and fall spinning amongst the clerks. Not all offices had air-conditioning: many had windows screened by light hurdles covered with sprigs of dry, brittle thorn on to which water dribbled from a pipe; this may have lowered the temperature a degree or two. Basra was criss-crossed by canals and perhaps they increased the humidity that plastered shirts to your back like cellophane.

  ‘The Venice of the East’, someone had nick-named Basra because of those canals. It wasn’t like Venice, despite the canals, but I think most visitors find a tranquil, sultry charm nonetheless in its corniche, in its cool, dark, sweetly odorous bazaars, in the date-gardens that straggle up the waterway pointing a long green finger towards the Marshes. Basra was – and is – an important commercial centre. I don’t know what the foreign business population was then, but it must have been considerable.

  By the time I arrived in Iraq in early 1951, those usually hard-working, Arabic-speaking and genuinely intrepid British administrators, who were there usually because they wanted to be, had long departed. Philby was by then an elderly man, living in King Ibn Saud’s Arabia, and famous as an explorer, cartographer and writer. Bertram Thomas, having been the first European to cross the huge Empty Quarter of Arabia on foot and camel-back (Philby and Thesiger were the second and third respectively), had gone on to found the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) at Shemlan in Lebanon, later to be known as a ‘spy school’. Dickson was in Kuwait writing his masterly book The Arab of the Desert. Others, who had similarly spent part of their youth in the Iraq of the Mandate, were in other jobs or respectable retirement or had died. Iraqi officials had long since taken over their duties. Socially, the British ‘pioneers’ in Mesopotamia were replaced by an eager tide of British merchants, shippers, oilmen, bank managers, assessors and the like, who followed on with wives and children when things looked politically well settled. Most of these newcomers rooted themselves, naturally enough, in the cities where their offices were. They caused neat housing estates and British-only clubs to be built and planted their wives and children firmly inside them, hedging them round with reassuring protocol: visiting cards, hats and long gloves at Embassy garden parties, bridge parties, and committee work. Everything they did to ‘improve’ their lives separated them from the Arabs of Iraq. It was as if they deliberately set out to hack down the last bridges of sympathy that linked the British community and the Iraqis, many of whom still felt affection for Britons they had come to know in earlier, socially more relaxed days. Since 1932, Iraq had been an independent, self-administering country; a member of the League of Nations; an Arab monarchy under heavy British influence, it is true, yet independent nonetheless.

  In the history of Iraqi-British relations, 1932–58 was a sad period of growing apart. It lasted through to the end of the reign of King Faisal I in 1936, survived King Ghazi, who died young in an automobile accident in 1939, and continued through the reign of his boy-son King Faisal II who ruled under the dominant eyes of his uncle, Prince Abdulillah, and his shrewd, old Prime Minister, Nuri es Said. Successive British Ambassadors, still grandly pro-consular, lorded it in the great walled embassy on the Tigris. It was an uneasy period that lasted until the revolution in 1958 swept that era away, and today, although many Britons (and other non-Arabs) work in Iraq and although even the British Club in Baghdad survives, the stuffy chauvinism of some British
‘sahibs’, that could be so oppressive in the Basra of the early 1950s, is no more. But even at the late date of my arrival I was in time, if only just, to glimpse the few final flickerings of the old British raj life that somehow survived there. Although, of course, Iraq was never part of the Empire, Kipling, perhaps even Conrad, could still have felt reasonably at home in Basra in 1951.

  I remember sweating in appalling damp heat up the grubby cement steps to our little office in the heart of the bazaar, being greeted by young Salman, the tea-boy, Mr Haik, our huge but gentle Armenian accountant whose rolling, sweating chins emerged winter and summer from acres of tweed suiting and waistcoats, and our one Assyrian girl typist, whose name I wish I could remember. I introduced myself to my more senior British colleague, a nice, diminutive, middle-aged Liverpudlian who stepped forward, hand outstretched, to greet me, with perspiration flowing down the lines of his face. Another British colleague, an old stager, dressed in solar topee and knee-length bell-bottomed shorts, took me under his wing in the lunch-break and drove me – or rather, his driver, Ali, with four gold teeth, drove us – to the British Club, a stricken-looking thatched bungalow near the Shatt al Arab waterway. The club was home-from-home to the British community.

  ‘You’ll have to join, old chap,’ he said as we creaked across the club’s loose verandah floorboards, and fat, splay-footed lizards flicked away from us. ‘Doesn’t do to try and live much on your own.’

  As far as the leaders of the British community were concerned it evidently did not do at all. I found that out later when my craving to get into wild places and be an explorer became irresistible and I began edging away from the pleasant but limited and monotonous life of British Basra; first, spending my evenings trying to learn Arabic, later disappearing for weekends, and indeed any other holidays, up to the Marshes. Stern or pained looks of outrage began to come my way then; and soon, after a number of whiskies and sodas had gone down the hatch in the club, some old Basra hands, perhaps a Glaswegian Cargo Superintendent, grizzled by fifteen years in the Gulf, or a manager of a British bank completing his quarter century of sweltering postings from Aleppo to Abadan, would put a kindly hand on my shoulder and say, ‘Look, laddie, take it easy. I’ve seen people go native before, you know.’ Such warnings were unsettling though well-meant.